HEMLOCK A Forest Giant on the Edge

HEMLOCK A Forest Giant on the Edge by David R. Foster editor. Yale University Press, 2014

I had never thought of eastern hemlock as a forest giant until I visited the mountains of western North Carolina. In my northern New England experience, an old-growth hemlock was a good-sized tree, often equal in girth to eastern white pine, but lacking the pine’s impressive height. But that old-growth hemlock stand in the southern Appalachians had many trees over 140 feet tall and 400 years of age, and it changed my measure of a species that has no ecological counterpart in our eastern forests. But now those southern giants are gone, killed by hemlock wooly adelgid . . . . .